Industrial Health and Safety. Ancient Concerns

Industrial health and safety is also described as "occupational health" and "industrial hygiene." The medical treatment of workers and the study of work-related diseases are known as "occupational medicine."

Health and safety concerns of industrial workers are well known in literature. They have also been points of contention for organized labor and important threads within environmental history. In literature, occupational disease has sometimes been portrayed with humor, as in English writer Lewis Carroll's "mad hatter," who was crazy because of mercury poisoning from making hats. A more somber view was taken by English writer Charles Dickens, whose lead factory workers could not get up off the bed, and U.S. writer Upton Sinclair, whose slaughterhouse workers lost fingers and, eventually, their short, brutish lives in The Jungle.

The burdens of work-created illness were shouldered entirely by workers and families, rather than industry or taxpayers, until the mid-twentieth century. To this day most workers injured on the job lose most of their income as a result of job injuries. Improving industrial health has long been a primary goal of organized labor.

Historians have noted an overlap between occupational medicine and public health in many instances. For example, deaths of seventeen workers in tetraethyl lead refineries during the period 1924-1925 led to questions about the public health impact of leaded gasoline by scientists who were familiar with occupational impacts of lead poisoning.

The latter part of the twentieth century brought a decrease in the number of worker fatalities and the number of occupational diseases, such as black lung in coal miners and brown lung in textile mill workers. Even so, every day an average of 9,000 U.S. workers have disabling injuries on the job, 16 workers die from an injury, and 137 workers die from work-related diseases, according to the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The toll comes at a cost of over $100 billion—the equivalent health cost impact of all types of cancer.

Ancient Concerns. Although many of the problems of industrial safety and health have been recognized only during the past 150 years, a duty to protect workers has long been acknowledged. In the Bible, Deuteronomy chapter 22 has the admonition: "When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for [the] roof, so that you will not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone falls from it."

A similar social concern existed in ancient Greece. Greek biographer Plutarch (c. 45-125 ce), for example, recommended that only criminal slaves be used in lead and mercury mines. It is not just, he said, to expose noncriminals to the poisons of the mines.

Mercury and lead were well known as poisons, and Greek physicians appreciated their dangers. Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460-370 все) described a severe attack of colic (stomach pain) in lead miners. Around 200 все Greek physician Galen observed copper miners and noted dangers. Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides (c. 40-90 ce) noted in his Materia Medico that eating lead would cause colic, paralysis, and delirium.

Romans were also well aware of the dangers of certain occupations. Engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio noted in the first century все that lead workers had pale gray complexions. "In casting," Vitruvius noted, "the lead receives the current of air, [and] the fumes from it occupy the members of the body, and burning them thereon, rob the limbs of the virtues of the blood" (Hughes 1975, 5). Roman historian and scholar Pliny (23-79 ce) described workers using air bladders as masks to protect themselves from cinnabar (mercury) dust and vapors.

Despite some knowledge of industrial dangers, it was common practice in ancient Rome to sweeten wine and grape pulp with sheets of lead. Most of the problem of lead poisoning in the upper classes could be attributed to this fondness for sweet foods, rather than to lead water pipes, according to modern-day Canadian historian and toxicologist Jerome Nrigau.